


the butterfly flies out into the rain

by ciberbot



Category: Voltron: Defenders of Tomorrow, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alzina is Allura, Cyberpunk, Dante is Adam, Defenders of tomorrow - Freeform, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Hunk is Hunk tho cuz idk the au name yet sdjf, Keith is Akira, Leandro is Lance, M/M, Shiro is Hiroshi, Slow Burn, leakira - Freeform, pidge is petra
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-16
Packaged: 2019-06-28 06:02:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,714
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15701304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ciberbot/pseuds/ciberbot
Summary: Leandro Martinez leads a team of skilled burglars redistributing Galra wealth to the Empire's poor. Akira Kogane is a boy from the slums who moonlights as Kira, the most infamous guerrilla leader in all the Galra Empire with 2 billion credits on his head.Aka Leandro's hoverbike will jam while on the run from police. And Akira will happen to be in the area.





	the butterfly flies out into the rain

**Author's Note:**

> hey y'all! I kind of vomited this chapter last night cuz I wanted to hop onto the leakira train before it ended. I don't plan on making it very dramatic -- the first chapter just kind of ended up that way!? so expect a lot more laughs and sweet moments when they meet. for now, i'm just setting things up ^_^

Leandro swings his legs on the edge of the preciously stacked luxury housing buildings, entranced, instead, by the sight of the sun rising above the horizon, peering out from where the ground met space.

"This is amazing," he whispered, the words slipping from his lips. He pauses, then seems to actually register what he just said. "This is amazing!" he repeats, leaping up to turn around and flash a bright white grin at Petra and Hunk behind him.

"We shouldn't even be up here, Leandro," Hunk says worriedly, adjusting his oxygen mask for what seems the fiftieth time since they set out for the 51,354th story of Upper Class Public Housing Unit #959342. If anything, as the glorious sight of the upper class housing options came into view, he had become even more nervous about what the actual fuck they were about to take on.

Because on this rooftop, as a part of this scruffy ragtag gang, Hunk felt millions of light years out of place. They were muted shades of orange and white, but this entire roof was a vibrant green, lush spurts of exotic plant species cascading over winding paths of gold and silver. The maintenance cost alone, especially at this height, Hunk couldn't even begin to comprehend. Hellenistic sculptures with markedly European features were carefully placed around these paths, only their fainting glowing eyes and mouth indicating that they were a clever integration of the most technically refined gravity pumps Hunk had ever seen in person. He and Petra had barely been able to pry open the damn thing, nonetheless thrust their hands into the wiring.

In short, even if they had relegated themselves to pillaging the rooftop, they could have secured all their wages for at least one gloriously extravagant year.

Petra senses his weakness.

"Don't say you've forgotten why we're here, Hunk," Petra reminds him sharply, not turning from the keyboard they had set up in front of one the pumps. They're typing furiously away, recoding the function of the gravity pumps for their purposes. "Remember the people who need this. Remember their families. Remember the evil the Galra empire has done in order to maintain this disgustingly unfair --"

"I know, I know," he says, averting his eyes. "It's just-I'm scared you know? W-w-what if we get caught? I can't afford to take another strike on my record--"

"Relax," Leandro drawls, sidling over and slinging his arm across his broad shoulders. "Your boy L is here. How can we fail?"

"You say that every time," Hunk says helplessly.

"Hey, and every time what do we do? We keep staying alive and securing the motherfucking bag," Leandro argues back. Hunk looks unimpressed. Leandro opens his mouth, presumably to give Hunk even more sass, when --

"Done," Petra announces. They stretch out their arms in front of them, throwing a smirk Leandro's way.

Immediately, Leandro leaps over and picks up his baseball bat.

"All righty guys, you ready to get started?" Leandro announces to his little gang. Petra nods curtly and, after some hesitation, Hunk nods, too.

Leandro jumps up into the air, suspended a little longer thanks to Petra's manipulation of the gravity pumps and lands with force, slamming his baseball bat against the ground. The thick marble crumbles underneath his artificially enhanced strength; the apartment roof caves in. Leandro lands in the room and saunters out amidst a cloud of dust, swinging his bat to and fro, his eyes bright and mouth stretched into a white smile, to the sight of a wide-eyed family of three trembling with two hour laser slides in their arms aimed at him.

Before they can even fire, Leandro shoots forward like a bullet, pinballing his baseball bat around their necks -- not enough to kill them, but enough to knock them out cold. As the rest of the gang jumps down, Leandro kicks the clear plastic door of the elevator in the center of the room with force, and the door explodes in a spray of clear hexagonal shards. Petra runs past him and mangles generations' worth of carefully coded security systems and sliding doors and clockwork household chores, buying them extra time to go through the rest of the building before police arrive on the scene. Hunk and Leandro methodically ransack the apartment all the while, roughly pulling out drawers and skipping through VR animations of sparkling coins streaming through their fingers.

"Next!" Leandro yells after a few minutes. They swarm together in the center of the apartment, a restless, geared up mass high on the rush of obtaining 5,000,000 credits in just a few minutes.

"I'll take the first 100 floors," Pidge says.

"I'll take the next 100," Hunk says.

"And I'll take the 100 after that," Leandro said. He makes eye contact with both of them, making sure they catch his following words. "Retreat to the hideout when you're done using route D174." Hunk and Pidge nod. They're professionals, having done this a thousand times, knowing this process like the back of their hands. Leandro smiles at them, white teeth against tan skin.

"Let's go get 'em, team," he says. Together, they step into the elevator shaft and fall down, down.

***

Akira makes his way down through the overcrowded pedestrian sky, clutching his backpack to his chest. The air is a deafening roar with the sounds of what must be millions of jetpacks in the many, many floors between ground and space, and the exhaust and heat from the jetpacks so intense the world around Akira is distorted into shimmering, blurry refractions.

Every so often, someone's jetpack inevitably fails and momentarily brings several hundred people down, burning several faces. They turn on their intercoms and yell at each other, their voices becoming a cacophonous ringing in Akira's helmet that makes him wince before the nanobots kick in and their faces reconstruct as they jostle amongst each other again.

Typically, Akira doesn't take to the skies. Typically, Akira rides on his hoverbike, using the sleek, neatly maintained streaks of magenta and blue to zip around the city. Hiroshi, after all, had been a world class pilot and hoverbike rider. Akira had known from the start it was in his blood, and despite Dante's best efforts at tucking everybody in at 10 as a part of futile reform plans to ensure everybody would finally get a full night of rest, Akira would always get up at obscure hours of the night when Dante had finally passed out, tiptoing through the halways and grabbing the keys Hiroshi would very casually leave next to the door, and spend all night zooming through the city, cutting through the air like it was nothing.

Lost in his memories of Dante subsequently chasing after him in the mornings, slipper in hand, Akira almost doesn't pick up on the whispering over the intercom. And from one instance where he doesn't see them, he steps into another instance where then he does.

A sea of people part. Amidst the blood orange clusterfuck of people jostling in traffic are limp bodies, spinning around slowly in the air as their jetpacks slowly run out of fuel. As he gradually gets closer, he realizes, with a start, that they had been slowly burned to death, exposed for far too long to the searing heat, to the thick, acidic smog, to the eventual decay of the cheap, poorly engineered equipment they thought would hold for their flight. The flesh on their face and body are bared and charred, like animals cooked over a fire, in some parts melting to white bone.

The pungent smell of their burning flesh, of _death_ makes it through the oxygen filters. Akira gags, tears prickling the backs of his eyes. He turns his head away. He wants to throw up --

" _Worthless pieces of fucking shit, couldn't even afford a damn suit_ ," somebody pointedly mutters into the silence that had settled over the intercom system. Similar sentiments reverberate throughout the entire intercom, and a hundred thousand new tittering conversations break out about their _ineptitude_.

Akira's hold on his backpack tightens until his hands become fists and his fists become white. _Patience yields focus_ , he reminds himself. But just saying it once doesn't feel like anything, doesn't even seem to throw a single drop of water onto the fury he can already start building inside his soul from the useless cruelties of the people all around him. But Hiroshi wouldn't snap and hunt down this stranger and beat his fucking life out of their worthless bodies. Hiroshi wouldn't even let anybody see his expression shift on his face if he entertained it even hypothetically. Akira repeats _Patience yields focus patience yields focus_ to himself over and over again, thinking of his brother's gently smiling face that has never ever betrayed any pain, until the words blur into each other and the phrase disintegrates into fragmented syllables he can't attach any meaning to.

When Akira gets home, he will burst into their apartment so violently Hiroshi and Dante will look up at him in surprise. He will stalk to the garage and lock the door behind him, holding his backpack to his chest and staring hard at the wall, a thousand different emotions thundering in his chest.

Because inside his backpack had been _Kira_. Kira, the infamously radicalized militant leader with a 2 billion credit price on his head. Kira, instantly identifiable by his rich dark red bomber jacket and matching dark red bandana on his face. Kira, who would have been given a wide berth, maybe would have even been allowed to order people around, would have been able to save more people from this type of death only given to idiots . . . and the poor.

But during that moment, Akira had been, well, Akira.

Akira, the poor kid from the slums just a few floors away from the ground. Akira, barely able to afford a suit and goggles. Akira, just clutching his backpack in his arms and hoping it didn't melt in the heat.

He couldn't have done anything at all. How could he? He barely even existed, let alone mattered.

In the pedestrian skies, Akira drifts downwards, holding his backpack to his chest, and brushing up against the cooked bodies of dead poor men. He dreams of equality.


End file.
